The marketing of products and services online over the Internet through advertisements is big business. Advertising over the Internet seeks to reach individuals within a target set having very specific demographics (e.g. male, age 40-48, graduate of Stanford, living in California or New York, etc). This targeting of very specific demographics is in significant contrast to print and television advertisement that is generally capable only to reach an audience within some broad, general demographics (e.g. living in the vicinity of Los Angeles, or living in the vicinity of New York City, etc). The single appearance of an advertisement on a webpage is known as an online advertisement impression. Each time a webpage is requested by a user via the Internet represents an impression opportunity to display an advertisement in some portion of the webpage to the individual Internet user.
Some advertisers enter into contracts with an ad serving company (or publisher) to receive impressions. An advertiser may specify desired targeting criteria. For example, an advertiser may enter into a guaranteed delivery contract with the ad serving company, and the ad serving company may agree to post 2,000,000 impressions over thirty days for US$15,000. In some cases, an advertiser will choose to enter into a non-guaranteed contract with the ad server company and only pay for those impressions actually made by the ad serving company on their behalf. Of course, in modern Internet advertising systems, the competition among advertisers for placement of impressions under non-guaranteed contracts is often resolved by an auction, and the winning bidder's advertisements are shown in the available spaces of the impression.
Online advertising and marketing campaigns often rely, at least partially, on a process where any number of advertisers book contracts with the intention to reach users who satisfy some particular targeting criteria (e.g. male, age 40-48, graduate of Stanford, living in California or New York, etc). Matching a contract to a user can be thought of as a market function, where a user visit is a unit of supply, and a contract is a unit of demand. The market is served by matching supply to demand (or demand to supply). The matching of supply to demand applies to contextual advertising (e.g. text and graphical ads that match a page context and user impression) as well as to sponsored search advertising (e.g. ads that match with search engine queries and results). Various degrees of matching may occur when a user's attribute is matched against an advertiser's targeting criteria.
Considering that (1) the actual existence of a webpage impression opportunity suited for displaying an advertisement is not known until the user clicks on a link pointing to the subject webpage, and (2) that the matching process for selecting advertisements must complete before the webpage is actually displayed, it then becomes clear that the process of assembling competing contracts, completing the matching, and compositing the webpage with the advertiser's ads must start and complete within a matter of fractions of a second. Thus, a system that rapidly matches contracts to opportunities is needed.
Other automated features and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the accompanying drawings, and from the detailed description that follows below.